The Influence of Branch Order on Optimal Leaf Vein Geometries: Murray’s Law and Area Preserving Branching
Figure 6
The influence of parent diameter and order on vein symmetry.
Panel A: Heat map showing daughter branch symmetry, the ratio of the smaller daughter branch to the larger daughter branch, as a function of parent branch size. As parent branch diameter increases, the ratio of parent to daughter branch diameters becomes more asymmetric. Note that the abundance values for the 2D histogram are log transformed for image clarity, but the values on the key are not transformed. Panel B: Box and whisker plot of the decrease in symmetry with increasing vein orders. Within each box, the central red mark is the median value, the box edges represent the 25th and 75th percentiles, the whiskers extend to the most extreme data points not considered outliers, and outliers (red plus symbols) are plotted individually (see Fig. 4 caption for the definition of outliers). First order veins are largely symmetric, but symmetry decreases as vein order increases.